Letters полностью

Andrew is happy to be off in the dispatch sloop St. Lawrence. He feels more self-reproach for encouraging his friend’s literary aspirations than for sleeping with her, and Admiral Cochrane’s combination of ambitiousness and irresolution bothers him. George Cockburn, on the other hand, he finds immediately appealing upon their rendezvous at the mouth of the Patuxent, which the rear admiral is already charting for invasion purposes. Prevost, declares Cockburn, cannot see beyond the St. Lawrence River. Cochrane, though no coward, is the sort who will change his mind a dozen times before making it up and another dozen after, with little sense either of real opportunity or real improbability. The kidnapping scheme, for example, is a piece of foolishness: nobody in Madison’s cabinet is popular enough to command a decent ransom! And the “black cossack” business is another chimera: despite their best efforts, Cockburn’s men cannot recruit more than one or two blacks daily. Unlike your red Indians, who in a vain effort to preserve their sovereignty form desperate alliances with either Madison or the Crown, your Negro has no more wish to fight one white man’s battle than another’s. But Cochrane knows neither blacks nor Indians! Moreover, the man is greedy, in Cockburn’s opinion, beyond the permissible prize-taking activities of any responsible commander. In order properly to be feared, one must sometimes destroy instead of ransoming; but the destruction must be calculated for the best psychological effect. It astonishes Cockburn that either Prevost or Cochrane has had wit enough to suggest what he has been urging upon them for above a year, the seizure of Brother Jonathan’s capital city — and he is not surprised that Cochrane is already equivocating on the matter.

Andrew takes a gamble; confesses that he himself has altered Prevost’s instructions; demonstrates on the spot his knack for forgery. He volunteers his opinion that the capital should be seized first and briefly, just long enough to destroy the public buildings, with no discussion of ransom whatever; then a joint land and sea attack should be made on Baltimore, the economically more important target, whose privateering harbor should be destroyed and the rest of the city indemnified. If the Americans do not then sue for peace, the two cities should be garrisoned as a wedge between North and South while campaigns are mounted against New England and New Orleans. He Andrew knows the capital fairly well and is acquainted with several high elected officials, including the President and the secretary of state; he will be happy to serve Cockburn as guide, spy, or whatever.

The gamble pays off: Cockburn is as charmed by the counterfeit as by Andrew’s further proposals for exploiting sectional distrust among the Americans. Compromising documents should be forged, for example, to confirm the rumors that Secretary of War Armstrong has deliberately neglected the defenses of Washington because he wants the capital relocated further north — perhaps in Carlisle, Pennsylvania — to weaken the influence of the Virginia Combine. Letters should be written to Madison by “a spy in Cockburn’s fleet,” warning the President of the attack — and found later in War Department files. A well-timed sequence of false and true reports, from false and true double agents, ought totally to confuse the already divided Americans. Above all, the operation should be decisively executed, to point up as demoralizingly as possible the Yankees’ disorganization. To this end both Admiral Cochrane and General Ross — the one irresolute, the other reputedly overcautious — will need a bit of managing if they are not to spoil the essential audacity of the plan.

That word carries the day: it is audaciousness, exactly, which Prevost & Co. — even Wellington himself! — are short on, and which Cockburn and his friend the prince regent admire even in their adversaries. Old Bonaparte, damn him, has it aplenty; likewise the Yankee Commodore Joshua Barney, whose Baltimore flotilla of scows and barges has effectively hampered Cockburn’s Chesapeake activities this season. He Cockburn fancies himself not altogether without some audaciousness too, and is encouraged to fellow feeling, if not to unreserved trust, by the plain evidence of that trait in our ancestor.